Trapped
by NCISgirl1527
Summary: Maura's no long in jail, but that does not mean she is free. Sometimes the hardest jailers to escape are the ones that live inside our own heads. Maura's thoughts at the end of Killer in High Heels.


_**A look into Maura's head at the end of the last episode.**_

_**Disclaimers: Not mine.**_

_**Spoilers: Killer in High Heels**_

Maura sighed. She was exhausted. Her night in jail had terrified her, though not for the reasons anybody thought it would. She did not fear the other inmates, at least not after Paddy put out the word that she was not to be touched. He might be in jail, but it would be hard to ignore that he was about to stand trial for fifteen murders. Even most convicts did not want to cross a man like that.

Jane was right in believing that Paddy's protection made her a target for anyone who wanted to hurt Paddy, but Maura seriously doubted that anyone who wanted to hurt Paddy would not have already identified her as a target. Either way, it was certainly not the first time her life had been threatened. That was not what scared her either.

Mobsters and inmate were the same in that they were tangible, combatable human beings, and so they did not scare her. Perhaps they should, but she was not one to scare easily. She never had been, and she saw no reason to fear things she could fight. No, what scared her was the one thing she could not fight, the thing she could never escape: herself.

Those empty hours in her jail cell had left her alone to question and to analyze everything. She had tried desperately to fill in those blank hours, but no amount of thinking made things any clearer. Those hours were forever dark to her, which of course left her to wonder what had transpired in that time. Had she killed someone?

Searching her memory had achieved nothing, so she had begun to search herself. Jane was certain that Maura did not do it. Frankie shared his sister's conviction. Frost, Korsak, and Susie also seem convinced that Maura was incapable of murder. Maura herself knew better. Anyone was capable of murder given the right circumstances, even the chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

All her hard work, all her studying, even her title could not change the fact that she was still a human being. Maybe that was what scared her, the idea that despite everything she had made her life to be, she was no different than the people she had been locked up with. After all, at their very core, people were all very much alike.

Then again, even with all she had read, she had trouble believing that Angela and Paddy Doyle had anything in common. Well they both cared about her, but she was not sure that counted. They seemed to her as different as two people could be. So maybe not all people were the same.

Still that did not help Maura. After all, if people were different, how would these differences arise? The obvious answer seemed to be genetics, and if that was true, then she seemed destined for a prison cell. Her biological father was about to go on trial for over a dozen murders. On the other hand, her biological mother was a successful doctor and philanthropist.

Jane, of course, had not turned out like either of her parents. She fought to hold together the mismatched family her father had abandoned, but while refusing the role of mother and homemaker that Angela seemed to adore. Frankie, too, seemed to fall outside the mold. Then there was Tommy. How could three siblings turn out so differently? Two were cops, and the third was an ex-con.

She supposed the core of the problem was not really the fear that a world full of people might be like Paddy or that a world full of people would follow in their parents' legacy. Her fear was not for the multitudes. It was for herself. From the moment she found out her biological father was an Irish mob boss she had fought to convince herself that she was nothing like him; she would never been anything like him. However sitting in a jail cell caused her to realize that perhaps she was already like him in ways she could do nothing about.

The question remained: was murder one of those ways? What scared her most though was not the premise or the question, but the answer: she had no idea. She had lost those hours of her memory for good, and there was no getting them back.

In the end of course Jane had save her by proving that somebody else had committed the murder, but it still haunted Maura that she had not known until Jane proved it, that she was innocent. Most people would have believed in their innocence like a shield. They would have clung to it, but she had not. She had not even believed in it. What did that say about her?

She knew what Jane would say: she was being stupid. Of course she had been innocent. No one had ever doubted that. She, Maura, was nothing like Paddy Doyle. All he was, all he had ever been, was a sperm donor.

Of course that response was why Maura had not gone to Jane. The same was true of Frost, Korsak, Frankie, and Angela. They would all have brushed it off, trying to comfort her.

So instead she sat alone in the dark, pondering the life, and suddenly realized that she felt very much alone. Not only in the immediate sense, but in the cosmic sense as well. Of course she had friends and the Rizzolis were as good as family, but Maura found herself wishing she had family to call her own. Her adoptive parents were supportive but never warm or loving. Hope cared far more about her second daughter than her first. Paddy was in jail, but even free, he was still a murderer.

She felt darkness closing in on her from all angles. She wanted to push back, but she did not. She wanted to let herself be swallowed by it, but she could not. She found herself caught. She was out of jail, but she was not free. She was a prisoner of her own mind, and she had no idea how to escape.

_**Well…that turned out a little darker that I thought it would but I think it works…Please review.**_


End file.
